[Framers] Stefan wanted to know why so many of us Adobe users "feel" the way we do about Adobe

Wed Oct 13 12:43:10 PDT 2021

 You make a good point about attrition, Peter. I see very few job ads that require skills for authoring for in a print environment these days.
Nadine
    On Wednesday, October 13, 2021, 03:21:50 p.m. EDT, Peter Gold <peter at petergold.photography> wrote:  

 In the old days, Adobe had beta-test (AKA pre-release) programs, for which
interested volunteers who represent a range of users from single-person
business to large enterprises with multiple seats, could apply. Is there a
FM beta-test program now? Is anyone on this list in the program? Of course
the idea was to subject the testers to all possible user-level torture
before the real users could stumble on bugs and other issues, and fix as
many problems as possible before general release. Customers would only have
sunshine, harmony, and uninterrupted workflows. I participated in FM,
Acrobat, and InDesign pre-release programs. Corporations change over
time, and so, too, their attitudes towards what comprises good
customer care.

InDesign's pre-release program is still active. Lots of test releases and
candidate releases are provided to testers until Quality Assurance
certifies the release.

I stopped using FM when my work didn't require it back around FM 7, and was
especially sad to find that Adobe abandoned Macintosh compatibility. I
upgraded a few times for nostalgia and personal writing, by using
Parallels. But, when my Windows version on Parallels no longer supported
newer FM versions, I froze my system, stuck in amber but still working. I
haven't had to endure the frustrating and productivity-sinking intricacies
of upgrade experiences like I've read about on this list.

IMO, the FM development team has the challenging and frustrating mission of
trying to keep an ancient technological design alive and reliable in
corporate environments. Just getting each new FM release to print "Hello,
World!" under each new Windows release on each new CPU architecture,
formatted for every new digital output format, is quite a miracle. However,
the effort and expense to maintain the FM might be better spent on
developing a completely new underlying software design that seems to work
the same from a user's point-of-view. You know, like nations of citizens
being able to commute daily in their all-electric cars, using the same
habits* they learned while driving petroleum-fueled autos. The investment
in a fundamentally re-engineered FM should pay off going forward, unless
investments in imagined AI succeed in being able to replace technical
publishing with autonomous-everything.

*Well, maybe self-driving vehicles might help reduce the consequence of
drivers impaired by ingested chemical substances and those generated
social-media overdoses.

My short answer for Stefan is "Because Adobe seems to have stopped paying
attention to FM users." I don't know if his question encompases users of
all Adobe software products, or just FM. The FM user community is probably
the oldest demographic. It's not about age, but years of use, and the kind
of use. Technical authors and publishers, thanks to FM, are content
creators, often also editors, subject matter experts, and document
manufacturers. This mixture of skill-sets doesn't exist to the same degree
among other Adobe creative software products. Users of filmmaking software
usually aren't also the writers of source material, or the adapters to
treatments, screenplays, scripts, or production-accounting software. Nor do
they write the documentation for the products used for these specialized
skill areas. So, if something that should be simple and trouble-free, like
installing an upgraded version of a professional software product that a
large enterprise customer's technical publishing depends upon, often turns
out to crash the customer's workflow, that's a good example of why
customers feel that way. Perhaps customers feel that the corporate view is
that this generation of user and product will retire soon?

Just my continually-deflating $0.02.

On Wed, Oct 13, 2021 at 1:06 PM A Craig <acraig at shaw.ca> wrote:

>
> I wholeheartedly agree — except, sadly, I'm not semi-retired.
>
> Alison
>
>
> From: tammyvb at spectrumwritingllc.com
> To: "An email list for people using Adobe FrameMaker, software." <
> framers at lists.frameusers.com>
> Sent: Tuesday, 12 October, 2021 15:55:26
> Subject: [Framers] Stefan wanted to know why so many of us Adobe users
> "feel" the way we do about Adobe
>
> Because every single solitary time that I have to uninstall/reinstall an
> Adobe app., I hold my breath to see what kind of friggin' rabbit hole
> Adobe
> takes me down and yep, it pulled a doozy on me this week, and thanks to
> Adobe, I lost a good 2 hours' worth of work to get my system back up to
> 'snuff.
>
> I can give details if interested, but I just wanted to chime in to the
> thread from a few weeks ago, where someone stated that they feel that
> Adobe
> hates their customers. . . well, yea, I understand that feeling. I LOVE
> Adobe products. . . I HATE installing/uninstalling them and I hate that
> Adobe apparently does absolutely NO regression/system testing on their
> stuff
> when it comes to this.
>
> Count me in as another very dissatisfied and p*ssed off Adobe customer who
> is grateful to be semi-retired and not having to deal w/ this cr*p for
> much
> longer.
>
>
>
> Tammy Van Boening
> Tammy dot vanboening at spectrumwritingllc dot com
> www.spectrumwritingllc.com
> _____
>
>
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